One of the items that has come up on this depressing day, this sad rumination on the fate of the Democratic party in 2014, is the question of whether there exists any actual, material difference between the two political parties.
Some of the way that this is articulated is on the level of "style" vs. "substance": that is to say, there is this thing called "substance" -- policy wonkery, legislation, executive orders, initiatives, programs, the whole world of ideas -- that stands in opposition to "rhetoric" or "style," the surface fripperies that help to sell the whole ball of wax to the American public.
By this reckoning, rhetoric or style is probably where the differences between the parties loom largest. On substance, the difference is increasingly becoming a difference of degree, rather than kind: since the 1980s, a well-rehearsed litany of pressures -- the formation of the DLC, the intensification of corporate lobbying, the rise of a global neoliberal consensus -- have steadily eroded those areas of substance where differences were felt most clearly, with Dems pulling increasingly into the market-centered orbit of the GOP on such issues as free trade, management/labor relations, taxation, Social Security, and particularly on financial deregulation.
What is left is a difference of rhetoric, a sense that the two parties' most adamant differences are articulated over the terrain of the culture wars. This is not to say that hard-and-fast policies have not emerged from the arena of culture war issues, particularly with respect to women's rights and LGBT rights. But it is largely the rhetorical fallout from this culture war -- a war whose boundaries may shift, but rarely its intensity -- that dominates the headlines, and that distracts us from a more tacit area of agreement between the two parties on fiscal or economic issues.
However, to see the rhetoric as a surface frippery, under which the "real stuff" of substance occupies a more vital, if neglected place, is to miss a good part of the point. More below the Swirly Croissant of Kos.
So the difference between the two parties is a difference of rhetoric -- but rhetoric matters. Rhetoric, we might say, is substantive. Republican rhetoric does active harm to women, people of color, immigrants, LGBT people. We cannot deny that Republicans have been an impediment to all positive cultural change, pretty much since the Nixon era, and that they have actively cultivated the worst impulses in our present cultural dynamic. Look at Sandy Hook, look at the total inaction we have seen on gun control in the wake of Sandy Hook. Look at the hateful racist rhetoric directed at President Obama, and look at the toxic cultural environment that has surrounded and abetted the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, John Crawford III, Jordan Davis, and too many more to mention.
That rhetoric is real, and it distinguishes Republicans from Democrats.
But lest anyone think that I am trying to give Democrats cover here, what I also think about this Republican rhetoric is that its hatefulness provides Republican voters with a (certifiably awful) working theory for why wealth inequality is legitimate and needs to be perpetuated via policy. If you can make thinly veiled allusions to the "deserving" and "undeserving poor," if you can explain structural differences in opportunity as differences in motivation or temperament, if you can make a case that the structural disparities that underly inadequate housing, discriminatory lending practices, mass unemployment, and all the rest of it can be attributed to the victims of those disparities, then you can seamlessly link the regressive cultural side of your program to the regressive economic side of your program.
Democrats, on the other hand, offer no such working theory for their voters -- because they have linked a progressive cultural rhetoric of inclusivity to a tacit, de facto stance of business-friendly fiscal conservatism that actively undermines this inclusivity.
There is a strain of hypocrisy in a party platform that makes the claim that it wants to address inequality, and then turns around and tacitly underwrites inequality via regressive economic policies.
Rhetorically, and often substantively, Democrats are great on LGBT rights, women's rights, social justice for people of color -- but these policy goals are not placed on the same continuum as the party's historical commitment to the New Deal, the Great Society, and to progressive social change. Democrats give with one hand and take away with the other.
This not only accounts for their singular inefficacy in implementing policies in Washington; it also explains their inefficacy at the ballot box. Because there is no working theory that ties the Democrats' laudable rhetoric on progressive cultural change to their implementation of conservative economic policies -- many of which actively undermine progressive change on social issues.
As many diarists have noted, the road to reversing this disparity is a long one, and it is not cosmetic: for Democrats to lay claim to an identity that is more than simply Republican Lite, we can't simply alter our messaging, like some hackneyed Republican bigot who has sought to soften his misogynist image by way of a couple of ad buys and well-placed media appearances.
I'm afraid it's going to take a wholesale, top-to-bottom revisitation of the Democratic party's stance on economic issues: to jettison its periodic mania for trade agreements, its coy indifference to the most egregious legal and regulatory violations of the 2008 financial crisis, its tendency to muse aloud about tinkering with Social Security benefits, its bizarre belief that it can achieve a "grand bargain" with a party that would sooner live in a Mad Max dystopia than to concede an inch on wealth polarization.
This is the only way that the party can lay claim to the rhetoric of inclusivity that it forged in the fire of the New Deal, and that continues to limp anemically along in the tired tropes of present-day Democratic pols, the last residual trace of the great party of FDR.